The Story Behind HouseScan Inspections: How It All Began
By: KURT STEIN • March 24, 2025
I grew up in middle-class Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with a hardworking father who built a career in Industrial Engineering and Supply Chain Management. Inspired by him, I followed the same path—attending Penn State University to study Industrial Engineering and launching my career in process improvement within the manufacturing world.
My first job brought me to Jacksonville, Florida, in 2012 as a Process Improvement Engineer for Kraft Foods at their Maxwell House facility. I was young, ambitious, and eager to learn. Working in a 100+ year-old facility, I was surrounded by seasoned professionals with decades of experience. I absorbed everything I could. Over the years, I led projects that saved millions of dollars annually, then transitioned into Operations to broaden my skillset. Managing a team of experienced workers as a mid-20s engineer was a humbling and transformative experience. Under the mentorship of one of the best managers I’ve ever had, Dan Frisosky, I learned invaluable lessons about servant leadership, team motivation, and operational efficiency—lessons that would shape my future in ways I never anticipated.
After gaining significant leadership experience, I was recruited by a headhunter to join Zircosil Inc., a small manufacturing facility in Jacksonville. However, just 30 days after I started, the company was acquired by its only competitor, leading to mass layoffs and relocation of operations out of state. Shortly after, I took another role as an Operations Manager at Renaissance Food Group, overseeing a fresh food processing facility in Green Cove Springs. This job proved to be one of the most grueling challenges of my life. The facility was a chaotic, unsafe, and mismanaged startup. My manager was absent, the work environment was toxic, and the unrealistic demands pushed me to the brink of physical and mental exhaustion. By the end of 2016, I had reached my breaking point and walked away from the job.
After five years of grinding in manufacturing, I was burned out. But I had been saving aggressively, investing in real estate, and learning everything I could about the industry through the BiggerPockets Podcast. Financially stable and needing a reset, I took six months off to travel. I road-tripped across the U.S., visited my twin brother in Australia, and spent nearly a month in Thailand. It was a period of reflection, adventure, and healing.
By mid-2017, I was preparing to re-enter the workforce when an unexpected conversation changed everything. One evening, at a birthday dinner in Neptune Beach with my then-girlfriend (now wife) and her family, the topic naturally turned to real estate. Her family was deeply embedded in the industry—her father ran a successful real estate brokerage, her brother-in-law worked in mortgages, and several other family members were real estate agents. As the conversation flowed, the discussion shifted to home inspections, and complaints filled the table. There were frustrations that inspectors were too alarmist and killed deals. Others complained about missing major issues that cost them thousands. And I remembered my own experience of outdated processes: no online scheduling, inconvenient payment methods, and lack of customer service. I chimed in with my own experiences of clunky inspections that felt inefficient and frustrating.
Then, my father-in-law, Steve, looked across the table and said, “Kurt, why don’t you start a home inspection business?” That was the lightbulb moment. It was the spark that lit the fire. From that moment on, my mind was consumed with home inspections. I analyzed every pain point we had discussed and became obsessed with creating a better solution. That was the moment HouseScan Inspections was conceived.
What started as a bunch of pain points discussed around the dinner table would soon become my full-time pursuit. In the coming months, I dedicated myself to learning everything about the industry, developing a business model, and building a company that would eliminate the frustrations that had sparked the conversation that night.
This is just the beginning of the HouseScan story. In future blog posts, I’ll dive into the early days of the company, how we built our value proposition, what set us apart in the market, and how we grew. But for now, this is how it all started—a simple dinner conversation that sparked a vision to transform the home inspection industry in Jacksonville and beyond.
